The nurse didn't say anything.
"Does this happen often?" asked Step. "This kind of seizure?"
"Everything happens," said the nurse. "And nothing's ever the same twice."
Which told Step that she had seen babies like this who died.
She was still measuring when the neonate came, a doctor named Torwaldson. "Why wasn't this already done?"
"I insisted that she let me hold the baby for thirty seconds," said Step. "I threatened to break the windshield of her car if she didn't."
"I'm done here," said the nurse. She did not think Step was at all cute.
Torwaldson started taking soundings with his stethoscope. "It's time for you to go to the waiting room, Mr .
... Fletcher."
"Tell me about this kind of seizure," said Step.
"I'll tell you about this kind of seizure when I know what kind of seizure it is," said Torwaldson. "Pheno," he said to the nurse. "Let's get this under control."
Step left. There were times to be assertive and times to get out of the way.
He did not go to the waiting room. Instead he went to recovery, and the nurses there gave him no trouble about getting in to see DeAnne. Apparently she had been asking for him.
"Is he OK?" she said.
"The neonatal physician is checking him out. He said some thing about pheno. In my mind that seems to go with barbital. I assume that's something to stop the trembling."
"Did he seem worried?" asked DeAnne.
"He seemed competent and he seemed confident," said Step. "How are you?"
"It hurts," said DeAnne, "but they're being very nice and pumping me full of drugs. I think they're going to give me a sleeping pill or something because I'm so worried about the baby. Say a prayer with me, Step.
Please?"
Step held her hand and prayed for the doctors to be able to find out what was wrong and to do whatever medical science could do to fix the problem and please let them have a long life with this little boy, they wanted him so much, but thy will be done. "I think he'll be fine," said Step. "I really do. They weren't doing anything dramatic. It wasn't an emergency."
In a little while she was asleep, and Step headed for the waiting room to start calling people. But first he saw Dr. Vender in the hall. She waved him over. "I'm sorry if I was a little short with you," she said. "I was afraid you were worrying Mrs. Fletcher."
"If I saw something wrong with the baby Dr. Vender, and I didn't tell her immediately, she would never trust me again."
"Well, some people need the truth and some people need anything but," said Dr. Vender. "I didn't know your wife or you, and so I did the safest thing. Or rather I tried to."
"Sorry," said Step. But he wasn't sorry, and she certainly knew it.
"Torwaldson is the best in Steuben," she said. "And he's on the phone right now with a neuro in Chapel Hill."
"Neuro?" asked Step.
"Neurosurgeon," she explained.
"Yeah, I know what a neuro is. I just wondered what it meant that he was calling one."
"I would guess," said Dr. Vender, "that it means he's run into something he hasn't seen before, or else he wants a corroborating opinion."
"Is the baby in danger of dying?"
"As far as I can see," said Dr. Vender, "no."
That was when Dr. Keese came bustling out into the hall. "Dr. Vender!" he called.
"This is Mr. Fletcher," said Dr. Vender.
Dr. Keese held out his hand, and Step shook it. "Nice to see you, I met you when I poked my head into the labor room, remember?"
Step shook his head. "Must have been before I got there."
"No, you were there," said Dr. Keese. "But I think you only had eyes for DeAnne. Sorry I couldn't be in there, but I can assure you that Dr. Vender did everything I would have done, and probably better."
How nice, thought Step. Doctors covering each other against a lawsuit.
"Mr. Fletcher," said Dr. Keese. "Dr. Torwaldson and I and Dr. Vender all agree that we need to stop the seizure activity, and for that we're giving your baby phenobarbital. We've given a fairly massive dose, for his body weight, but we've got to stop the seizures. Once we've got that under control, we'll step the dosage down to the minimum for maintenance. He's going into intensive care now, but I truly don't think he's in any danger of losing his life. So I urge you to go home. It's after midnight and you'll want to be up here in the morning. We'll know more then, and DeAnne will want to see you. All right?"
What choice did he have? He waited until he knew what room DeAnne was assigned to and where to find Zap the next morning, and then he went out to the car. He was just getting into the Datsun when he realized that there was no reason to leave the good car at the hospital. DeAnne wasn't going anywhere for a while. The rusty old two-door could keep its vigil here tonight. As he drove home, he couldn't stop thinking: My baby was born having a seizure and the doctors have never seen it before. Something's wrong with my youngest child, and I can't do anything but pray, and I can't think of a single reason why God should exclude the Stephen Fletcher family from the normal vicissitudes of life and so I don't think my prayers are going to be answered. Not my real prayer, anyway. The "thy will be done" part will certainly be answered, but the part about "Make this all go away so that nothing is wrong, so that the doctors say I can't understand it, there was a seizure last night but now there's not a trace of a problem, and he'll definitely be brilliant and healthy and live to a hundred and four"-I don't think God's going to adjust his plan for the universe to make room for accommodating that particular prayer.
When he got home, DeAnne's mother, Vette, met him at the door. "Oh," he said. "I hoped you'd be asleep."
"And I hoped you'd call from the hospital," she said.
He had forgotten to call. "There were problems. They sent me home. I decided to call from here."
"Problems?" She looked stricken.
"DeAnne is fine. But the baby seems to have something wrong and they don't know what it is. He was trembling. They called it a seizure. Well, actually, they called it 'seizure activity.' But they said it didn't look life threatening."
"Oh, I hate this," said Vette. "I hate not knowing."
"You and me both," said Step. "I guess I ought to call everybody now. It's only eleven P.m. in Utah, right?"
"Also Mary Anne Lowe said to tell you to call her no matter how late."
"OK," said Step. "I'll call her first."
He went into the kitchen and suddenly found himself sur rounded by tiny whining insects. He brushed his hands around his head but they wouldn't go away.
"Oh, aren't those gnats awful?" asked Vette. "I found a can of Raid and I've been spraying them, but new swarms just keep turning up. Do you get them all the time?"
"Never," said Step. "Where's the Raid?" The gnats all seemed to want to zoom right into his ear. "This is all I needed."
"I think they're coming from the laundry room," said Vette. "I haven't found any in the kids' rooms yet."
"We have this weird bug thing," said Step. He went into the laundry room and started looking around for where the gnats might be getting in through. As he looked, he told Vette about the crickets and the June bugs.
"We don't have any regular bug problem, I guess," he said. "It just comes in waves. Every couple of months or so some group of insects decide that our house is ready to go condo."
He found that the dryer hose had come partly away from the outdoor vent. He tried to push it tight, but the pressure jostled it and it fell completely away. Suddenly another swarm of gnats arose. Only they didn't come from the vent-they came from the hose. As if they had been spawned somewhere inside the dryer.
"Here, give me the Raid," he said.
Vette gave it to him, and he first sprayed the swarm that was orbiting his head. Then he sprayed up into the dryer hose and then out through the vent and when he thought he had dosed them enough, he slipped the hose back over the vent and then got a screwdriver from the laundry room cupboar
d and tightened the collar over the hose so it wouldn't slip away again.
"What are we doing in this house?" he said, when he got back into the kitchen.
"Getting by," said Vette. "Doing what you must for your family."
"We should never have left Vigor."
"Step, you know that I think you never should have left Utah! But you are not having problems with little Jeremy because you moved to North Carolina."
"How do you know? Maybe the doctor did something wrong. In Salt Lake they have a billion babies every year, they've seen everything. Out here there just aren't as many babies and so they're learning on Zap."
Vette winced. "Do you really call him Zap?"
"Well, the first thing Robbie said when he heard the name Jeremy was 'Germy, Germy Germy' so maybe Zaps the lesser of two evils."
"Step, things go wrong sometimes no matter where you live, and sometimes things go right, and you know something? Most things that happen aren't anybody's fault at all, so it's really kind of vain of you to think that your moving to North Carolina caused your newborn baby to have a seizure. You didn't do a single thing to cause it. For all you know whatever problem he has was determined at the moment of conception."
"Yeah, well, I was there for that, too." Then he was appalled that he had said such a thing. He and DeAnne's parents got along really well, but still, you don't talk about the conception of your children to your wife's mother.
"Better call people," said Vette. "I'll keep watching for the gna ts."
Step called Mary Anne first. It took longer than such calls usually did, because he mentioned that the baby was in intensive care and then he had to answer, "We don't know yet" to about fifty questions. It went that way with every call, but he couldn't very well not tell them the baby was having trouble, or when they found out they'd be deeply hurt. Besides, if prayer was going to be of any help in this situation, he wanted all the people praying that he could find.
He didn't finish the calls until nearly three. He had already sent Sylvette to bed, persuading her to go by pointing out that she'd be needed to take care of the kids in the morning while he went up to the hospital, and then she'd take her shift at the hospital while he stayed home with the kids-she'd need her sleep.
"So will you," Vette retorted.
"Yeah, but 1 can take a nap while I'm driving back and forth to the hospital."
She laughed and let him pull out the sofa bed, which DeAnne had already made up for her mother that morning. Then he moved his phone operations into the bedroom. When he finished the calls and took his last patrol through the house, she was asleep.
He looked in on each of the kids. Betsy, cuddled up to the stuffed Snoopy that- for reasons passing understanding-she had named Wilbur. Robbie, holding his real-fur stuffed bunny, which had been named Mammalee since his infancy. And Stevie, holding on to nothing.
You're all safe here in my house, Step thought silently, and yet I really can't keep you safe at all, can I?
Because there's that new one, not six hours old yet, and his life is in danger and I'm not even there because I'm completely useless. And here you are, asleep, safe in your beds, only something's going on inside your head, Stevie, and I can't reach in and find out what's happening and make it get better. I can plug up one hole and sweep the crickets out, but then the june bugs get in somewhere else, and then the gnats. Even when you have a perfect child, nothing stays perfect. Something always gets in. The good things are always, always at risk.
In the bedroom, undressed and ready for bed, he did what he hadn't done in years, though DeAnne did it every night. He knelt down beside the bed, the way he had done on his mission, the way he had done as a child.
He poured out his heart and asked for mercy for his new baby. Let him live. Let him have a good life. If it's within the power of my priesthood to heal him, then let me heal him when I give him a blessing tomorrow. I don't want to lose him. I want all my children, this one as much as any of the others, and all the children yet unborn that you might have for us. Don't take him away from us. Whatever he needs, we'll give it, if we have it to give.
Later, lying in bed, it occurred to him that he might have been praying for the Lord to grant him and DeAnne sixty years of caring for an invalid child. That perhaps what was wrong with Zap was so severe that it would be cruel to keep him here if the Lord was willing to take him home. So he re-entered the prayer that he thought he had closed, and added the phrase that he had deliberately left out when he was on his knees: Thy will be done.
DeAnne had recovered enough to go home, but she didn't want to. "I've never left the hospital without my baby," she said.
"You'll see him every day," said Dr. Keese. "And so will Step. And so will your mother. But you're not on insurance, I understand, and this is going to eat up your savings. You need whatever money you have to take care of Jeremy."
She said nothing.
"Good," he said. "They'll have you ready to go at noon."
To fill the empty time, she went back to the book. She had forgotten to pack it, and yet it had turned out to be the only thing that could keep her mind off Jeremy. She could read about the family in the book and say, We may have problems, but at least we'll never be like them.
No, it was more than that. The book kept speaking to her, characters kept saying things that echoed in her heart. Like when the nice son in the story said something about how life is like a cliff that's eroding away and you spend your whole life just shoring it up. It was the nightmare of her life, the one that lived always at the back of her mind, and he had named it. Only it wasn't him, of course. It was the author. Tyler wrote those words for me, she thought, so I'd know that I wasn't alone going through these fearful days.
This last morning in the hospital, she reached the passage where the mother in the book speaks of her "three lovely pregnancies" and how she counted down the months, waiting for something perfect to happen. "It seemed I was full of light," the mother said. "It was light and plans that filled me." DeAnne let the book fall onto the blanket and turned her face into the pillow and wept.
She must have cried herself to sleep, because when she next opened her eyes, Step was sitting there, leaning forward on the chair beside the bed, his chin resting on his hands, his elbows on his knees. He was looking at nothing, staring at the wall.
"Hello," said DeAnne.
"Hi, Fish Lady, " said Step. At once the somberness left him, and if she hadn't had that moment of watching him unawares, she would never have known that he was anything but bright and confident. "I understand the doctor wants to kick you out and send you home. And I've got to tell you that I hope you come."
"I will," she said. "But please not yet."
"DeAnne, you'll be up here at least twice a day to nurse him. I'll drive you here, or your mother will. But in between those times, you need to be back home."
She reached out for his hand. "Step, I don't want to leave without the baby."
"He's doing better all the time," said Step. "And we couldn't very well give him all these tests at home."
"I don't like what they're doing to him here," said DeAnne. "I don't like the way he's drugged all the time."
"I don't like it either," said Step. "But we're not doctors."
"They don't know everything," she said.
"But they know something," said Step. "And sleeping in a hospital bed isn't going to make you or me any wiser about what we ought to do. Please-you've spent too much time here alone."
"I hardly have any time alone," said DeAnne. "I think every sister in the Steuben 1 st Ward has been up here twice."
"At church this morning the bishop asked everybody to fast and pray for Zap next Sunday. The whole ward."
It filled DeAnne with emotion to hear that. They really weren't alone. And maybe with so many people fasting and praying, God would hear.
Or maybe not. Maybe it would be like in the book. Maybe things would always be just a little bit out of control, just out of reach.
&nb
sp; Step reached down onto the floor. "You dropped your book," he said.
"I don't want to read it anymore," she said.
"Oh? I thought you liked it. Yesterday you even read me a passage from it."
"She knows too much," said DeAnne. "It hurts too much."
"Fine, I'll put it up on the shelf here-"
"No," she said. "No, give it to me."
"So you are going to read it."
"No," she said. "I'm just going to hold it. Is that all right?"
He looked at her strangely.
"I'm not going crazy, Step. It just ... it's an anchor. It's another woman telling me she knows about things going wrong, and I just need to hold the book, OK? I mean at least it's not a Barbie doll or something."
"Fine," said Step. "I just wondered if this is going to become an icon to you. Like scripture. The fifth standard work?"
"Don't make fun," she said. "This is very hard for me, you know. I've always prided myself on making perfect babies. Now all I've got left that I make perfectly is my pie crusts."
"I wasn't making fun," he said, as he reached down and embraced her awkwardly "And he is a perfect baby DeAnne."
"You can't just deny it and make it go away," said DeAnne.
"He has the perfect body for the life God intends him to live. For the life he intends us to live."
God's plan. Nothing we can do about it. Might as well stop praying or trying or anything.
No, he doesn't really believe that, she realized. Because when we've talked about this sort of thing before, it was me who argued that God must plan all our lives or it wouldn't be fair, and he's the one who said, God doesn't have a plan for our lives, he just put us all into a world where no matter what our life is like, we can still discover how good and strong we are, or how weak we are, or how evil or cowardly. He's saying this about God's plan to make me feel better.
"I keep thinking," she said, "that we shouldn't have made love so soon after I used the spermicide the last time."
He shook his head. "It wasn't all that soon, DeAnne."
"You're supposed to wait longer. A week."
"DeAnne, the doctors don't even know what the problem is, let alone what caused it."
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